Wanted ! Building Ideas that take Freight cars inside!

New York City's High Line is gold mine for ideas on this subject.  One random example among many:

EDIT:

Oops, sorry.  You said freight:

if you have patience.

Chelsea Market Passage is a good option.

AG.

We have some ideas in the works that may be interesting for you!

Sir, 

here are some ideas.

Korber Kit bashed as a Candy Factory with the car/siding going under the building.

Railcar Manufacturing Co with bashed Walthers kits and Pikestuff parts etc.

Scratched built Utility.. 

Here's a freelanced warehouse with a covered car dock under construction. The primary purpose was as a view block.

Since it's a background building, the panels are just paper textures.

This gives you an idea of how long the building is. 48"x20"x10"

It's loosely modeled after this building that stood at 2nd and Alameda near Downtown Los Angeles. The building was "red-tagged" and demolished after a couple of healthy earthquakes.

I really like everyone's ideas and pictures. For some reason, having the trains show thru the buildings are just great! Thank you, Terry

Here is shot inside a paper warehouse. If built as a model, could easily open up the right side wall or add large windows so that the car could be seen in the building.

Here's the interior of a small MOW shed that I built awhile ago:

The Planters Peanuts plant in Suffolk, replaced twenty years ago, had a loading/unloading dock inside. When we were in high school, several of us worked there and unloaded boxcars of bagged peanut skins. Talk about nasty, dusty, etc... That was it.

We used to time how many bags we could unload per minute. That got us in trouble with the union shop steward (we were not union) who received complaints from his older guys doing the same job. The more he complained, the faster we worked. Finally we were "transferred" to other jobs in the plant.

One day we will get a replica of part of the plant built but it is in the future. Thinking about it, I think that Harry Heike has something that will work. Thanks for this thread, I will e-mail him. Maybe a York pickup!

Steel mills take lots of freight cars inside - from ingot cars being filled at open hearths to boxcars and gondolas loaded with finished product (coils, sheets).  Many mills on O gauge railroads have external gantry cranes, but my experience was with inside overhead cranes ranging from 60-300 ton capacity.  Many railcars were loaded inside buildings.

Here's the real Weirton Steel Blooming Mill.  A tour is being conducted (note the buses and the passenger cars).

Here's my Blooming Mill (left) and my Open Hearth with ingot buggies.

George

I used to switch the Goodyear Eagle tire plant in Lawton, OK.  It was an enormous facility with 2 tracks inside a warehouse with a capacity of 20+ 50' boxcars.  It might be possible to model the façade of the warehouse to save space.  The facility also included spots for: bulk rubber on bulkhead flats, naptha and wax in tank cars, and carbon black in covered hoppers.  I dream design ridiculously huge switching layouts on AutoCAD for practice and the sheer fun of it...they always include a tire plant.

Rob had a good suggestion. Many auto assembly plants and parts suppliers had sidings that ran inside buildings.

Jeff C

What we don’t need are more miniature town buildings. O & S scale has been flooded with them over the years.

I built several industrial sized buildings on a 12” wide footprint.

You don’t need full scale size buildings taking up real estate if you do this.

I built this building for my club out of modular building sections. It was built to fit around the track. There is a hidden siding along the wall, under the houses. The entrance is through a tunnel portal in the mountain. The business is named Wayout Widgets because it's the "way out" of the siding.  Visitors at our open houses get a kick out of seeing a train suddenly appear coming out of the building.

That is nice Matt, who is doing the building?

John

there is some great looking models guys, excellent work!

This one from OGR has a door on the other side of the building. We are in the process of putting this on our layout with a track entering the building.

Matt - Outstanding job!  I may have to try to copy that on my layout.

Art

Attached is a building I want to construct down the road. It is perfect for a small corner at the end of a spur. It is the small white structure in the top left of the picture.

Matt...I am with Art!!  That is a fantastic looking warehouse!

Alan

Sorry to be a bit off topic, but who makes the two "old timey" steamers?  I'd guess the 4-4-0 is MTH, but who makes the 4-6-0?  catalog numbers too please.  I want a couple like those.  Thanks.

You are right on the MTH. The other one is a Williams by Bachmann. 

Cool, thanks!

I totally AGREE with this remark as well! Bring on the Industry!

Originally posted by Model Structures:

Attached is a building I want to construct down the road. It is perfect for a small corner at the end of a spur. It is the small white structure in the top left of the picture.

Are you referring to Fran Ellison's Delta Lines and the Oblong Box co?

Originally Posted by AGHRMatt:

...

That is nice Matt, who is doing the building?

John

I built it basically to see if I could. Another "Modeling on the Cheap" article test project which was designed as a view block. As a foreground layout building, the same technique could be used with DPM or Korber modular panels and strip wood (Don "Industrial Models" Smith uses this technique on a whole new level).

I needed a structure to represent a "iron and steel fabrication shop" for a corner scene on my layout.  Basically, I wanted a place for a couple of flat cars or a couple of gondolas to be spotted bringing in steel in sheets or I beams, etc and finished products being shipped to oil field job sites in small towns.  I wanted something that I could perhaps spot a car inside and another outside under an overhead crane.

I contacted Joe at OGR Forum Sponsor Model Structures and gave him my basic design.  This is the structure he built for me:

The part of the structure on the left is simply a 1/4 inch thick "flat" that represents the portion of the building where most of the "fabrication" takes place.  The "3-D" loading shed is where some of the loading takes place. 

The above photo was taken in Joe's shop prior to shipping to me.  He has this photo along with another large structure he built for me on his website. 

The "kitbashed OGR AmeriTowne structures and flats" structure is also a view block similar to the concept AGHRMatt used (tall structure to be used as a view block) but with the added benefit of being painted differently with different components (few windows and 4 loading docks as opposed to lots of windows and three loading docks).  Since you can only see one side at a time, the "one structure-two industries" concept works...at least for me...and it IS my railroad, right?

Back to the original iron and steel fabrication shop...I have since added an overhead crane structure so the pipes, I-beams and sheet (or rolled) steel can be off loaded from the gons and flats. 

Granted, everything is in disarray right now as I am rebuilding some of those areas, but I have the structures ready to go back with the revised track plan.

Since my layout is a shelf (approximately 24-30 inches, around the walls of a 16ft x 20ft building in my back yard with a 4ft x 10ft center peninsula where the AmeriTowne structure lives as a view block) most of my structures are flats.  Thus my grain elevator with the "loading shed" and the iron and steel fabrication shop give special visual treatment to those structures, just as the different wall sections and paint and door arrangements on the AmeriTowne building give each of those structures unique appearance on my layout.

I have been fortunate that I was able to acquire some very nice custom structures via friends and commercial services along with eBay and some of our fellow OGR Forum members.  I have some completely scratch built (such as the large grain elevator and flour mill made with sheet styrene and 4 inch diameter PVC pipe; building flats made from OGR AmeriTowne building fronts or backs; mat board structures; wall panels from Korber kits...and more,

I simply do not have the room in my "storage building" layout space to have very many "3-D" structures, so the custom built iron and steel fabrication shop was a compromise for me to have a low relief structure but still have room for an internal loading dock.

I hope something in those comments is useful and perhaps helps you pick some options that might work well for your needs.

Now, I should also admit that I have very few structures that I built.  The last time I tried to work with any "super glue" product, I spent 12 hours in the ER waiting my turn to have my fingers cut apart...and I am still waiting on the hair to grow back on my head where I scratched....(just kidding)

(or was I?)

MILLER ENGINEERING'S
MINIATURE FLUORESCENT LAMPS

Link - http://www.microstru.com/Flourescents.html

This is a feed and seed dealer of my own design. Also a small Jon Deere dealer. They take a freight car load of bulk out back on the covered track. Suits a branch line railroad just fine.

Bob

In my search for breweries with Atlas beer car candidates, I ran across a photo of a

brewery in downtown Denver (can't find photo now, nor remember brewery, as didn't establish that they had their own logoed reefers) in which one of those double door Burlington reefers that All-Nation offered an O scale kit model of (that I have on three rail trucks) was shown mostly into the building, with the nearest trucks on track in the sidewalk.  Apparently the track came right across the street and immediately into the building, through a car sized door, in a building that directly fronted the street.  The entire front of the building was not shown, just that car sticking out of the car door.  Somebody in Denver may remember this brewery/building.

I did not know the building was his design!

If you have more pictures please post them.

Thanks

Joe